The bibliography on conspiracies is large, much larger than what I refer to here, but it
is also obscure. The books come and go, but rarely do they stay in print for very long.
The exposés are written by critics of the organizations. Few of them are formally trained
historians or social scientists. The exceptions to this rule tend to be Marxists and new
left historians. The conventional histories are written by men who probably know about the
personal and economic connections that have made possible certain groups' exercise of
power, but the authors are careful not to emphasize these connections. They may tell you
that a group of men had great influence, but they do not explain why. Above all, they do
not follow the money. Isaacson and Thomas's book, The Wise Men, is a representative
example. Why were these six men so powerful in foreign policy circles (especially
"Chip" Bohlen)? We are not told. The biographies of Eluhu Root, Henry L.
Stimson, and John J. McCloy are sometimes large, yet they reveal remarkably little about
the personal connections by which these three men wielded power. These three men were the
unofficial chairmen of the unofficial American Establishment, each in succession, followed
by David Rockefeller, McCloy's "protégé," according to McCloy's biographer.
How did they gain their influence? Endless repetitions of the phrase "public
service" conceal rather than explain.

When we consider the amount of ink and media time devoted to the
Watergate break-in, an event which brought down a President but whose perpetrators' actual
motivation was never clearly explained, we should be curious. If all that media coverage
and the millions of dollars of government investigative money did not reveal an acceptable
answer as to why the break-in occurred, think of the really important political events of
history. How can we make sense of them.; How can we discovered what really happened and
why it happened.; For example, could the Watergate break-in really have been engineered by
John Dean in order to learn whether the Democrats had learned of his new wife's possible
connection to a prostitution ring, which is the thesis of Colodny and Gettlin's Silent
Coup (St. Martin's, 1991)? If so, then there was less to Watergate than the
investigators had imagined, and the fallout from it was remarkable when compared to this
information's importance to Richard Nixon.

The Watergate investigation became a media extravaganza that seemed to
elevate the reporter's calling to national status. Yet some of the details of the
Watergate investigation raise questions that only hard-core conspiracy buffs ever ask. For
instance, we all know that Nixon was brought down because of the White House audiotapes.
But he refused to give up these tapes in one fell swoop. In fact, not until 1996 were
scholars given access to these tapes. Only under specific demands by government
prosecutors did Nixon turn over limited sections of those tapes. Gary Allen in 1976
summarized the findings of Susan Huck's February, 1975, article in American Opinion, the
publication of the John Birch Society. Allen wrote in The Kissinger File (p. 179):

Consider the fantastic detail involved in the requests. On August 14th,
for example, Judge Sirica demanded the "entire segment of tape on the reel identified
as 'White House telephone start 5/25/72 (2:00 P.M.) (skipping 8 lines) 6/2:3/72 (2:50
P.M.) (832) complete.'" I don't know what all the identifying numbers mean  but
you have to agree that only somebody very familiar with the tapes would know. These
boys knew precisely what to look for! Here is another sample request:

January 8, 1973 from 4:05 to 5:34 P.M. (E.O.B.)

a) at approximately 10 minutes and 15 seconds into the conversation, a
segment lasting 6 minutes and 31 seconds:

b) at approximately 67 minutes into the conversation, a segment lasting 11
minutes;

c) at approximately 82 minutes and 15 seconds into the conversation, a
segment lasting 5 minutes and 31 seconds.

Only Susan Huck asked the obvious question: How did the prosecutors
know precisely when these incriminating discussions took place? There are only two
possible answers: (1) someone with access to the tapes inside the White House was leaking
the information; (2) there was a secret back-up set of the tapes in the hands of someone
who was leaking the information. Leaked information would have been illegal for
prosecutors to use in court, yet this was how they brought Nixon down.

To my knowledge, no reporter or professional historian has ever
bothered to follow up on this remarkable oddity, or even mention it. Nobody ever asked:
"What person was in charge of storing those tapes?" It took one of the least
known and most diligent conspiracy historians (Ph.D. in geography) even to mention the
problem. Strange? Not at all. Normal, in fact. Such is the nature of history and the
writing of history whenever the events in question point to the operation of powerful
people whose private interests are advanced by what appear to be honorable public
activities that cost a lot of money.

Not every exposé is equally reliable in its assessment of the facts.
Similarly, not every conventional history is equally innocuous in what it reveals. Even a
poorly researched exposé can alert us to things to look up in conventional histories.

Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our
Time, pp. 936-56. New York: Macmillan, 1966. Reprinted by GSC & Associates, P. O.
Box 6448-Eastview Station, San Pedro, California 90734.

Steel, Ronald. Walter' Lippmann and the American Century. New York:
Vintage, 1981.

Wells, H. G. The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution. Garden
City, New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928.

Primary Sources

The Freemen Digest, Salt Lake City, published a remarkable
series of magazine-length reports in 1978 and 1979. The researcher gained the cooperation
of many Insider organizations, which shared their documents with him and agreed to their
publication without editorial comment. I am informed by Cleon Skousen, the publisher, that
the Council on Foreign Relations was so pleased with its report that it ordered thousands
of extra copies to be placed in libraries around the world. Unfortunately, the project
ended prior to the researcher's release of the materials on that most important of all
international organizations, the Bank for International Settlements, which had supplied
him with reams of material. The published reports included: